The Storyteller Read online

  I did not know how long I could continue this. But I wasn't going to let Baruch Beiler take away the only thing I had left--my father's home and his business.

  However, fewer customers were coming into town. It was too dangerous. My father's body had been one of three found this week around the outskirts of the village, including a toddler who had wandered into the woods and had never returned. All had been disfigured and devoured the same way, as if by a ravenous animal. Frightened, the townspeople were opting to live off their own gardens and canned goods. Yesterday I had seen only a dozen customers; today there had been only six. Even some of the merchants had chosen to stay safe behind their locked doors. The market was a gray, ghostly space, the wind whistling over the cobblestones like a warning.

  I opened my eyes to find Damian shaking me awake. "Dreaming of me, darling?" he asked. He reached past me, brushing my face, and ripped the neck from a baguette. He popped the bread into his mouth. "Mmm. You are nearly the baker your father was." For just a moment, compassion transformed his features. "I'm sorry about your loss, Ania."

  Other customers had told me the same. "Thank you," I murmured.

  "I, on the other hand, am not," Baruch Beiler announced, coming to stand behind the captain. "Since it greatly diminishes my chances of ever receiving his tax revenue."

  "It is not the end of the week yet," I said, panicking.

  Where would I go if he turned me out into the streets? I had seen women who sold themselves, who haunted the alleys of the village like shadows and who were dead in the eyes. I could accept Damian's offer of marriage, but that was just a different kind of deal with the Devil. Then again, if I were homeless, how long would it be before the beast that was preying upon the people of our village found me?

  From the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching. It was the new man in town, leading his brother on the leather leash. He walked past me without even glancing at the bread, and stood in front of the empty wooden plank where the butcher usually set up his wares. When he turned to me, I felt as if a fire had been kindled beneath my ribs. "Where is the butcher?" he asked.

  "He isn't selling today," I murmured.

  I realized he was younger than I'd first thought, perhaps just a few years older than me. His eyes were the most impossible color I had ever seen--gold, but gleaming, as if they were lit from within. His skin was flushed, with bright spots of color on his cheeks. His brown hair fell unevenly over his brow.

  He was wearing only that white shirt, the one that had been beneath the coat he traded the last time he'd been in the village square. I wondered what he had been willing to barter with today.

  He didn't say anything, just narrowed his eyes as he stared at me.

  "The merchants are running scared," Baruch Beiler said. "Just like everyone else in this godforsaken town."

  "Not all of us have iron gates to keep the animals out," answered Damian.

  "Or in," I murmured beneath my breath, but Beiler heard me.

  "Ten zloty," he hissed. "By Friday."

  Damian reached into his military jacket and pulled out a leather pouch. He counted the silver coins into his palm and flung them at Beiler. "Consider the debt paid," he said.

  Beiler knelt, collecting the money. Then he stood and shrugged. "Until next month." He stalked toward his mansion, locking the gates behind himself before vanishing into the massive stone house.

  From their position in front of the empty meat stall, I could see the man and his brother watching us.

  "Well?" Damian looked at me. "Didn't your father teach you any manners?"

  "Thank you."

  "Perhaps you'd like to show your appreciation," he said. "Your debt to Beiler's paid. But now you owe one to me."

  Swallowing, I came up on my tiptoes, and kissed his cheek.

  He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his crotch. When I tried to push away from him, he ground his mouth against mine. "You know I could take what I want anytime," he said softly, his hands bracketing my head and squeezing my temples so hard that I could not think, could barely listen. "I am only offering you a choice out of the goodness of my heart."

  One minute he was there, and the next, he wasn't. I fell, the cobblestones cold against my legs, as the man with the golden eyes yanked Damian away from me and wrestled him to the ground. "She already chose," he gritted out, punctuating his words with blows to the captain's face.

  As I scrambled away from their fight, the boy in the leather mask stared at me.

  I think we both realized at the same time that his leash was dangling, free.

  The boy threw back his head and started to run, his footsteps echoing like gunshots as he raced across the deserted village square.

  His brother paused, distracted. It was enough of a hesitation for Damian to land a solid punch. The man's head snapped back, but he staggered to his feet and chased after the boy.

  "You can run," Damian said, wiping the blood from his mouth. "But you can't hide."

  LEO

  The woman on the phone is breathless. "I've been trying to find you for years," she says.

  This is my first red flag. We're not that hard to find. You ring up the Justice Department, and mention why you're calling, you'll be routed to the office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. But we take every call, and we take them seriously. So I ask the woman her name.

  "Miranda Coontz," she says. "Except that's my married name. My maiden name was Schultz."

  "So, Ms. Coontz," I say, "I can hardly hear you."

  "I have to whisper," she says. "He's listening. He always manages to come into the room when I start trying to tell people who he really is . . ."

  As she goes on and on, I wait to hear the word Nazi or even World War II. We're the division that prosecutes cases against people who have committed human rights violations--genocides, torture, war crimes. We're the real Nazi hunters, nowhere near as glamorous as we're made out to be in film and television. I'm not Daniel Craig or Vin Diesel or Eric Bana, just plain old Leo Stein. I don't pack a pistol; my weapon of choice is a historian named Genevra, who speaks seven languages and never fails to point out when I need a haircut or when my tie doesn't match my shirt. I work in a job that gets harder and harder to do every day, as the generation that perpetrated the crimes of the Holocaust dies out.

  For fifteen minutes I listen to Miranda Coontz explain how someone in her own household is stalking her, and how at first she thought the FBI had sent him as a drone to kill her. This is red flag number two. First of all, the FBI doesn't go around killing people. Second, if they did want to kill her, she'd already be dead. "You know, Ms. Coontz," I say, when she breaks to take a breath, "I'm not sure that you've got the right department . . ."

  "If you bear with me," she promises, "it will all make sense."

  Not for the first time, I wonder how a guy like me--thirty-seven, top of his class at Harvard Law--turned down a sure partnership and a dizzying salary at a Boston law firm for a government pay grade and a career as the deputy chief of HRSP. In a parallel universe I would be trying white-collar criminals, instead of building a case around a former SS guard who died just before we were able to extradite him. Or, for that matter, talking to Ms. Coontz.

  Then again, it didn't take me long in the world of corporate law to realize that truth is an afterthought in court. In fact, truth is an afterthought in most trials. But there were six million people who were lied to, during World War II, and somebody owes them the truth.

  ". . . and you've heard of Josef Mengele?"

  At that, my ears perk up. Of course I've heard of Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the chief medical officer who experimented on humans and who met incoming prisoners and directed them either to the right, to work, or to the left, the gas chambers. Although historically we know that Mengele could not have met every transport, almost every Auschwitz survivor with whom I've spoken insists it was Mengele who met his or her transport --no matter what hour of the day the arrival